My tulip is just on the verge of opening up. I’m betting we see this beauty again.
Here’s another quote for John O’Donohue which seems very appropriate in these days of isolation:
The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace.
One of my goals this year is to do more bird photography. I like to assign myself projects because it gets me out the door and shooting. So I’m calling this one Birds, Birds, Birds and the goal is to intentionally photograph birds at least once a month, preferably once a week but knowing how my schedule and the weather interfere with my photography I think once a month is more realistic for now. Anyway, I decided to get it kicked off this week with a trip to North Mountain Park. The bird feeders are always a good place to start. This handsome house finch was the most colorful visitor while I was there. I was happy to catch him in the tree and away from the feeders.
As I was preparing to post this I got another bright idea (my bright ideas always get me in trouble). But I thought it might be fun to create an art piece from each image of the week and then at the end of the year I would have a nice album of my best photos. So, here is this week’s art piece. I just don’t know if I will be able to keep it up. But I think it is worth a try.
So my nephew got married and I got to take home some of the table decorations from the receptions. The roses have held up pretty well so I decided to take them up to the studio. This was shot with the Velvet 56 mounted on the M3. I added a high pass filter and one texture and adjusted the color balance a little because it was showing a little on the yellow side. Wow, only five more days to go!
We had a very short walk in the forest this afternoon but I was overwhelmed with the selection of mushrooms available for photographing. Many had flat tops but this one with the pointy top was my fav. I opened the shadows and bumped up the exposure a little. Then added a high pass filter. I may have to go back on Friday with the big girl camera and have more fun with mushrooms.
Arles is a wonderful old town dating to Roman times with lots of windy alleys and stone buildings. I opted to treat this one as a black and white but gave it a yellow tone to represent the tone of the city and sunny Provence.
Grower’s Markets are always a great place to find fun things to photograph and today was no exception. I took the M100 with the Sweet 50 attached and then swapped it out for the Edge 35 and went around again. This one was captured with the sweet 50. Bottom line, I was in my happy place with the Sweet 50 and not so much with the Edge 35. So, decision made, given my ineptness it is not worth carrying around nearly a pound of dead weight and the Edge is staying home. The Sweet 50 and the Trio28 will have to carry the load for the lensbaby project (pun intended). I just hope I don’t turn into one of those camera nerds with two cameras slung around their neck.
I wanted to have a little more practice with the Edge 35 so I headed over to Jacksonville this morning to see what I could do with it. I had some interesting results with old building but then my eye landed on a bullet nose Studebaker from the 1950s parked on Main street with a for sale sign on it. As is frequently the case when photographing old cars the shiny chrome picked up the reflection of the photographer and I didn’t notice it until I got home. The red upholstery was reflecting light all around the cabin. I got the slice of focus right where I wanted it on the steering column and through the dash. The windows were quite blown out so I added a couple of textures to tone them down a little. Still on the fence about taking this optic to France. But I haven’t talked myself out of it yet.
So if this looks a lot like yesterday’s image I count that as a success. My online art group had an assignment this month to create three related images processed in the same way. Since I didn’t get around to shooting something new today I thought I would go back to the Lithia Park images and give it a try. Same black and white conversion in Silver Efex Pro, same Dark Sepia toning, same texture from 2 Lil Owls. And also shot with the Burnside 35. Something about rustic stairs I can never resist. I think the third in the series may also be of stairs.
Another beautiful sunset at the coast this week. In fact this one was right up there with the best I’ve ever seen. From the time this was shot as the sun was dipping below the horizon until about an hour later the sky just kept getting more and more colorful. I debated whether to post this one or one of the more colorful ones but I thought this one was more interesting with the sillouettes of the old piers.
And that, my friends, is a wrap. I set out this morning to photograph the fresh new blossoms that my hydrangea is still putting out with the rain and the season and all this one of a fading blossom with raindrops seemed more appropriate for the close of the project. It was shot with the 100mm macro lens on the Canon 7D Mark II. In post there was a little spot healing, a lightroom preset, some adjustment of exposure and two textures added. Thanks for hanging in with me the last 100 days. This site will revert to the weekly photo blog next week. However, if you are a real glutton for punishment things should start popping up on my travel blog (http://jeannehoadley.com/Travel) about Friday or Saturday of next week.